The present invention relates to the field of computerized drug identification.
Drug interactions remain a principal aspect of the pharmaceutical sciences. A drug interaction is a commonly known situation in which a substance affects the activity of a drug, such that the effects of a given drug is increased or decreased, or the combination of the substance and the drug produce a new effect that neither produces alone. Typically, drug-drug interactions are most unpredictable; however, drug-food interactions also are known to exist between drugs and foods, as well as drug-herb interactions between drugs and herbs.
Generally speaking, it is desirable to avoid drug interactions due to the possibility of a poor or unexpected outcome resulting from the interaction of a drug with another substance. Consequently, known drug interactions often are listed in the literature distributed with a drug. Providing an exhaustive list of drug interactions in literature, however, can be difficult when a substantial number of drug interactions are known to exist. As such, voluminous books have been created as an aggregation of known drug interactions. While the most diligent review of a book of known drug interactions will reveal the requisite information necessary to avoid an undesirable outcome from a drug interaction of a prescribed selection of drugs, in practice it is not reasonable to presume that a dispensary of drugs will consult the requisite literature when dispensing a drug.